Gosopodaria Nereju, Vrancea county, second half of the 19th century (1875)
The house from Nereju Mic originates in the ethnographic area of Vrancea, a place with villages organised in the past in a joint ownership. In that area, there was a continuous preoccupation for the farming of the land and increasing its productivity by fertilizing it with the help of sheeps, kept on the fields (“târlire”).
Built in the second half of the 19th century and transferred in the museum in 1936, yeoman Ion Stoian Creţu’s house has an interior arranged in a typical Vrancea style, with wall carpets and polychrome striped counterpanes on the bed or on the dowry chest. In the foyer, one can see wooden pails decorated with pyrographed floral motifs and a hide drum, while in the room there are expressive masks made of wood or fur, and used for the winter specific customs (Christmas and New Year) or for the wake of the dead (“chipăruș” dance).
The house is built on a stone base, out of round fir beams, and has in the front a porch closed with fretted planks and carved pillars; at the closed end, there is a wooden bed used for rest in the summer. The hip roof is covered with “duckbill” shaped shingles, and the walls are daubed and whitewashed both on the inside and the outside.
The house is surrounded by a board fence, with access through a ingenious wooden sliding gate. Next to it, attached to the fence, one can see the “merindar”, a space where the housewife used to put water and fruits for the foreign travellers in transit through the village, as a sign of hospitality.
The locals were well known craftsman in wood working, especially in making lag vessels and shingles, craft mirrored in the tool inventory of the house storeroom.
